In Erie, Colorado, a local mom is understandably alarmed by the level of benzene — a known human carcinogen — in her 6-year-old son’s blood. There is plenty of drilling and fracking happening around Erie, including a wellpad 1,300′ to the west of the Erie elementary school that was built in 2012 and now hosts at least 8 producing wells. Prevailing winds in Erie typically blow from the west, putting the elementary school and the neighboring middle school directly downwind from this large drilling site, making the drilling operations an obvious suspect for the cause of this contamination. Slam dunk, right?

Map showing locations of Erie, Colorado elementary and middle schools, and nearby features of interest noted in the text.

But the situation may not be that simple, as illustrated in the map above. The schools have a much closer neighbor — a gasoline station that’s right across the street, 250′ north of the elementary school, that has been there since at least 1993. When I worked for the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1990s, the problem of fuel oozing out of leaking underground storage tanks (yes, we called them LUSTs) at homes, gas stations, on farms, and other sites around the country was just beginning to get nationwide attention and prompted a suite of new rules from the EPA. Gas stations around the country were required to replace their old tanks. Many sites had plumes of gasoline floating on the local water table, sometimes migrating off the gas station property and into surrounding neighborhoods, sending fumes into basements and chemicals into water-supply wells. Gasoline contains benzene. Could kids at these schools be exposed to old gasoline contamination from this nearby filling station? Or to gasoline vapors being released today, as customers fill up their vehicles?

Looking south-southwest at gasoline filling station across the street from Erie Elementary School (just beyond the treeline).

There’s also a lumber mill 900′ south of the elementary school property line, and it too has been there since at least 1993. The mill probably operates diesel-powered equipment, and may even have its own diesel fuel storage tank onsite. Diesel fuel and fumes, and exhaust from diesel engines, all contain benzene. This site is not upwind from the school, so I would consider it a less-likely source of exposure for the kids there.

And I don’t know where this boy lives; maybe he’s grown up with a filling station or some other benzene-spewing industrial site nearby. He may not even go to this school.

None of this speculation — and it is pure speculation on our part — is intended to deflect attention from the increasingly well-documented health impacts that result from living near modern drilling and fracking operations. Everybody’s situation is different, and we just want to be sure we’re pointing our fingers at the right culprit so that A) we’ll be taken seriously, and B) the problem will be fixed. Sometimes that culprit may be oil and gas drilling. At other times it may be something that we’re overlooking.

In April 2017, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan signed a bill reinstating a fracking ban in the state. The Maryland General Assembly imposed a temporary moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in 2013, and — following similar bans in Vermont in 2012 and New York in 2015 — the 2017 bill makes Maryland the third state in the country to ban fracking.

The research conducted by Johns Hopkins relied on oil and gas infrastructure data produced by SkyTruth. That means our work was among the things that Maryland legislators considered when they chose to extend the state’s ban on fracking. It’s incredibly exciting to see our work play such a direct role in policy-making, and it highlights the importance of continuing to update our oil and gas footprint data sets and sharing them for free with researchers and the public. We’re continuing to map the footprint of oil and gas development in Appalachia, so keep checking in for updates. Way to go Maryland!

According to a new study by Environmental Health Perspectives, 17.6 million Americans live within one mile of an active oil or gas well. West Virginia topped the list. Half of the state’s population resides within a mile of an active well.

Aerial survey photos (above & below) from the 2013 National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) show how drilling and fracking have altered the West Virginia landscape.

Studies have found links between public health outcomes and active oil and gas production.

Oil and gas development:

degrades the quality of air and water,

contaminates the soil,

increases exposure to noise and light pollution.

People who live within a mile of an active well have higher rates of health problems including:

heart-related illness,

neurological problems,

cancer,

asthma.

Living near an active well has also been associated with adverse health outcomes in babies including:

pre-term birth,

lower birth weight,

neural tube defects,

congenital heart defects.

In Everyone’s Backyard: Assessing Proximity of Fracking to Communities At-Risk in West Virginia’s Marcellus Shale

SkyTruth recently partnered with Downstream Strategies and San Francisco University on a related report, focused on West Virginia. The report concluded that Marcellus Shale gas production has become more common near places essential for everyday life in West Virginia, increasing the potential for human exposure to toxic chemicals.

“This report shines a light on the impacts of fracking on the health and well-being of West Virginians. It is a perfect example of why I founded SkyTruth,” said John Amos. “If people are aware of how these decisions impact their lives, they will be able to be part of the solution.”

Many Homes Are Too Close to Well Pads

According to the report, more than 7,000 homes were located less than one-half mile from well pads in 2014. While the Horizontal Well Control Act established a setback distance of 625 feet between the center of well pads and homes, many homes are located closer than this distance to well pads.

Well Pads Have Encroached on Schools

As fracking progressed in West Virginia, well pads have also encroached on schools. By 2014, seven schools had at least one well pad within one-half mile, and 36 schools had at least one well located within one mile.

More Well Pads Have Been Built Near Public Lands, Including Water Protection Areas and Healthcare Facilities

Well pads must be more than 1,000 feet from public drinking water intakes; however, there are no restrictions on the construction of well pads within drinking water protection areas upstream from intakes. In 2014, hundreds of well pads and impoundments were in these protection areas. Since 2007, more and more well pads and impoundments have been built in or near public lands and health care facilities.

A systematic, screening-level evaluation of the toxicity of chemicals self-reported by operators in West Virginia revealed several hazardous substances had been used to frack wells near schools and immediately upstream from surface public drinking water intakes.

New Setback Distances Needed

Unlike other states, West Virginia State Code does not require setbacks between Marcellus Shale development and several types of sensitive areas assessed in this report. Setback distances for schools, healthcare facilities, and public lands—and restrictions in zones of critical concern and zones of peripheral concern above drinking water intakes—would help protect vulnerable populations and recreational opportunities as fracking development continues.

“Now that this analysis is completed, it’s a good time for the Legislature to consider new setback distances from homes, schools, and other sensitive areas,” said Evan Hansen, President of Downstream Strategies.

https://www.skytruth.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/WV_FrackFinder_NAIP_1.png8781657Brady Burker/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/test_logo.pngBrady Burker2017-08-23 20:07:372017-09-06 16:15:05Half of West Virginians Live Within a Mile of an Active Well

The wasteful practice of flaring off natural gas from oil and gas fields is again making news, coinciding with a new release of SkyTruth’s Global Flaring Map that visualizes gas flaring activity around the globe. This map relies on the Nightfire data provided by NOAA’s Earth Observation Group, which has written extensively about their work detecting and characterizing sub-pixel hot sources using multispectral data collected globally, each night, by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the Suomi-NPP satellite. Read about the algorithm that creates Nightfire data here and methods for estimating flared gas volumes here.

Date range selection helps you limit the visualization to the time-frame of interest.

You can identify your rectangular Area of Interest and download flaring data within that AOI (works best in Chrome browsers).

We’ve caught up with NOAA’s daily download after adjusting to recent changes in their web security.

About our Global Flaring Map

Please read about some of the uses for this map and how SkyTruth processes NOAA’s data in this original post describing our map. If you don’t see a flaring detection you expected to see, consider the caveats: some flares don’t burn hot enough to be included in our dataset, they may not have been burning when the satellite passed overhead, the flare may not be frequent enough to make it past the 3 detection threshold, heavy clouds may have obscured the flare from the sensor, etc.

If you find this map useful, drop us an email at info@skytruth.org to let us know.

Despite the Senate’s action to keep the methane rule, the Environmental Protection Agency just announced (as of 6/15/2017) they would suspend implementation of the rule for 90 days — an action leading environmental groups claim is unlawful.

During Phase 1 of our FrackFinder WV project, we focused on identifying and delineating wellpads (drilling sites) and drilling-related fluid impoundments across West Virginia that have been built to accommodate the recent boom in drilling and fracking to produce natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica Shales. This data has been provided to our partners, researchers at Downstream Strategies and the University of California – Berkeley, who are studying the human health impacts of living near modern drilling and fracking operations.

This slider shows an area near Wilsontown, WV before and after drilling took place (the wellpad is highlighted in red, and an impoundment is shown in blue):

We thought we’d assess the direct environmental impact by measuring the change in the landscape resulting from all this construction activity. Here’s the breakdown of how much land was converted to industrial use between 2007 and 2014 as a result of fracking, categorized by the type of land cover that existed in the area before the wellpads and impoundments were built. The land cover data is from the National Land Cover Database, which is derived from Landsat imagery.

Land Area Converted to Wellpads and Impoundments, 2007-2014

Detected barren land is likely drilling predating 2006. Lightly developed is a mixture of development, roadways, and residential green space.

It appears that the NLCD is registering this land conversion, as seen in the three images below which show the same area displayed in the slider. A wellpad first appeared on this site in 2011, which was when the NLCD was last updated using moderate-resolution satellite imagery, and it is identifying the drilling site as “barren” land. It is worth noting that of the 1,081 acres of forest cleared for drilling infrastructure, 27.8 were cleared in the Monongahela National Forest.

2006 National Land Cover Data, near Wilsontown, WV.

The 2011 update of the National Land Cover Dataset, detected a fracking wellpad in the center of this image and registered it as Barren Land. See the next image when the outline of the wellpad is displayed.

The 2011 National Land Cover Data, with results from our West Virginia FrackFinder project displayed.

We find that 1,756 acres of land in West Virginia was converted to wellpads (averaging 2.3 acres in size) and impoundments (averaging 0.8 acres in size) from 2007 to 2014. That is an area 1/4 the size of Morgantown, WV and is 7 times larger than the town of Shepherdstown (where SkyTruth is based). This is a very conservative starting point for measuring the true drilling “footprint” because it doesn’t capture the total land area disturbed to construct the pads and facilitate drilling: tree clearing, site excavation and grading to accommodate heavy equipment and provide drainage control, access roads and utility / pipeline corridors, and associated facilities like compressor stations and storage facilities. Later this year we may ask you to help us delineate this larger halo of direct land disturbance related to drilling, which we speculate could be 2-3 times larger than the footprint of the wellpads and impoundments alone.

In the meantime we are gearing up for the launch of Phase 2 of FrackFinder WV. During this stage of the project, citizen volunteers (that’s you!) will assist SkyTruth in creating a dataset of homes which lie within 1/2 mile of the wellpads we identified in Phase 1, data that our partners think will be very useful for public health research.

So be sure to keep an eye out for project updates and calls for volunteers! If you sign up on our Volunteer page, you’ll get an email from us when the next FrackFinder project is up and running.

Up to this point, Allegheny County in southwestern Pennsylvania has been mostly spared from much of the fracking boom spanning that state. This may change however, as oil and gas companies have been systematically leasing property around the county for potential drilling. Usually it’s hard to get a handle on the magnitude of this threat, since leases on private property are generally difficult to discover. Fortunately for the public (us included), our friends at FracTracker Alliance built the Allegheny Lease Mapping Project: an interactive online map showing land parcels leased or contracted to oil and gas companies. Individual parcels of land that have been tied to oil and gas records can be selected to pull up a variety of information about that parcel. Users can explore the map to see where a parcel of leased land is located relative to homes, schools, bodies of water, parks, and other sites of interest. This tool is meant to help citizens, communities and policymakers make informed decisions about zoning, land use, and future oil and gas development in the region.

We thought it would be useful for folks to see where all the oil and gas leases are in the county, relative to the Marcellus Shale gas drilling and fracking that has already happened. FracTracker graciously provided their dataset, and we filtered it to only show parcels tied to an “active” lease. Here is the result. Properties with an active lease are displayed in green. Those that have experienced some drilling activity since the Marcellus boom began a decade ago, are shown in red:

Active leases (green) in Allegheny County, PA. Active leases that have experienced some drilling activity since 2005 shown in red. Click to enlarge.

Though much of Pennsylvania that overlies the Marcellus Shale has seen extensive fracking development, most of Allegheny County hasn’t yet had any of this modern drilling with hydraulic fracturing. But the large area under lease should give residents throughout Allegheny County some concern: a significant amount of drilling could be in their future, and drilling sites could be built uncomfortably close to where people live and work. The average size of a well pad is 3-5 acres, potentially bigger than a football field or even the deck of an aircraft carrier. In this illustration, hypothetical well pads and access roads (shown in yellow) are placed over existing leases in the northeastern portion of Allegheny County that have not yet been drilled (orange). Many of the leases come close to, or overlap with, existing residential areas:

A portion of northeastern Allegheny County showing active oil and gas leases in orange that have not yet been drilled, in an area of mixed residential, forest, and agricultural land use. Hypothetical drilling sites (“well pads”) and access roads are shown in yellow. Click to enlarge.

Detail from above, showing potential proximity of large industrial drilling sites to homes and a school. Click to enlarge.

In the close up above, we see that a potential well pad of typical size dwarfs the high school and football field only 1200 ft away. During drilling the neighborhoods nearby would have to cope with health, safety and lifestyle impacts associated with round-the-clock noise, heavy truck traffic, and degraded air quality, in addition to the longer-term potential for surface and ground water contamination caused by accidental leaks and spills.

It’s our hope that by making this hard-to-access leasing data easily available, folks in Allegheny County will be enabled and inspired to take action to protect their communities. A big tip ‘o the hat to FracTracker for building and sharing the lease dataset.

Last summer one of our interns, Jerrilyn Goldberg, put together an interactive story map detailing the impact hydraulic fracturing is having on the state of Pennsylvania. The map goes describes the fracking process and its associated risks, and how the growing industry is impacting local communities and the environment. She examines the proposition that switching to a natural gas dominated energy system would mitigate global warming, an important thing to consider when discussing future energy development. You can check out the story map by clicking the image below:

When thinking about fracking and its potential costs and benefits to society, it’s important to remember the impact it will have on the people living near it, not just the country as a whole. The industry touts the amount of potential energy that can be gained from a fracking well relative to its “small” footprint as a major advantage of the process over conventional gas wells and coal extraction. Wells can be permitted and drilled quickly, and with horizontal drilling a single well has access to a large area of potential gas reserves. This also means that wells can pop up at an alarming rate and fit into places that are uncomfortably close to where people live and work. Often times, these wells and their associated infrastructure are within sight and earshot of people’s homes, or even schools, hospitals, and other sensitive areas where people’s health can be put at risk by the 24/7 noise, lighting, diesel fumes, dust, and volatile chemicals emanating from typical drilling sites:

Here in western Pennsylvania we see how close fracking operations can come to people’s homes; the people living in the cluster of houses on the left have to live with the commotion around the well pads a stone’s throw away on a daily basis, and the massive fluid retainment ponds in blue could pose a threat to their health. Click on the image for a fullscreen version.

The story in West Virginia is very similar. Here a fracking well pad is less than a football field away from someone’s home. Click on the image for a fullscreen version.

Often times, many of the people that will be affected by a new fracking operation have little to no say in the matter. People are typically powerless to stop construction of a drilling site on a neighboring property, and don’t have any say in where and how the site and associated roads and utilities get built, even though they will still have to deal with the increased noise, light, and traffic, as well as decreased air quality. Health concerns are a major issue because fumes and volatile organic compounds (VOC’s) originating from well pads and fluid retainment ponds have been linked to respiratory and skin illnesses. Fracking operations have also been known to contaminate people’s drinking water by causing methane migration, posing an explosion hazard, and fracking fluids that have made it into the water table can render water unsafe for drinking, bathing, and even laundry. Accidents like fluid spills and well blowouts are an ever-present threat, with the potential to send thousands of gallons of fracking fluid spewing into the air and onto the surrounding landscape, as happened to a well in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania in 2010 that resulted in more than 35,000 gallons of fracturing fluid contaminating the environment. Local campers had to be evacuated from the area.

Hydraulic fracturing has really taken off in the last decade thanks to horizontal drilling technology. Here, in this section of southwestern Pennsylvania, we can see how rapidly fracking operations have expanded near the Pittsburgh area. The colored dots show the locations of new drilling sites similar to the ones shown in the images above, identified with help from our FrackFinder volunteers.

Because of its location over a particularly rich part of the Marcellus Shale, Pennsylvania has been one of the states most heavily impacted by the fracking boom, but fracking has begun to take off in other states as well. These include Ohio and West Virginia, where along with Pennsylvania you’ve helped us investigate and map drilling activity through our FrackFinder project to quantify the growing impact of fracking in each state, and make the data available to the public and to researchers investigating the impact of fracking on public health and the environment.

Ohio sits partially atop the Utica shale. This map shows the locations of well pads built between 2010 and 2013 in a small part of the eastern portion of the state, and the access roads that were carved out to support them. Click on the image for a fullscreen version.

Fracking is relatively new to West Virginia, and the topography is rugged (as shown by this shaded-relief map), so well pads aren’t yet spaced as densely as they are in states like Pennsylvania. The red polygons represent well pad construction, and the dark blue represent retainment ponds. Click on the image for a fullscreen version.

If you’d like to learn more about fracking and how it impacts people and the environment, be sure to check out Jerrilyn’s story map for an in-depth look!

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